Christina Hillsberg - License to Parent: How My Career As a Spy Helped Me Raise Resourceful, Self-Sufficient Kids

Contrary to popular belief, James Bond is an absolutely terrible spy. The primary goal of espionage is to gather intelligence clandestinely so that no one knows its being done. Rather than shooting up a city or leading an elaborate car chase, the best spies in the world operate in the shadows, quietly stealing state secrets from around the world right under the noses of foreign governments. Quite frankly, if a spy has to pull out his gun or someone is chasing him, hes done something very wrong!

And dont even get me started on the Bond girls. In real espionage, some of the best spies are not mere busty, lusty man-eaters. Theyre highly trained professional women who hold clandestine meetings with foreign assets all over the world, track terrorists, and write and brief the president of the United States. I should know. I was one of them.

Of course, I came into contact with many James Bond wannabes during my time at the CIA. They were certainly smooth operators, but truth be told, after several years there, I was done dating spies. The Agency attracted some of the most interesting individuals, and I was convinced I had dated them allthere was the spy who cooked me crepes in the nude, the spy who rifled through my panty drawer, and, of course, the married spy who broke my heart. I promised myself never again. And absolutely under no circumstances would I marry one.

Then I met Ryan, and I didnt stand a chance.

I didnt start off dreaming of joining the CIA. Prior to college, I didnt have much exposure to the wider world at all, let alone the world of international espionage. I grew up primarily in the Midwest in a Catholic family that alternated between being Christmas-and-Easter Catholics and regular mass attendees. I was the youngest of three kids, and my mom stayed home with my siblings and me until returning to nursing part-time when I started high school. She was born in a small town in West Virginia, and at ten years old, she moved with her parents and siblings to a farm that had been in her family for generations. That farm, and its rolling hills and roaming cattle, became a permanent fixture of my childhood and the place where I spent the majority of my holidays until I became an adult. My dad, also from West Virginia, grew up in a nearby town, and throughout my childhood he traveled domestically and internationally for his work as a safety and environmental manager at an aluminum plant.

When I was in elementary school, we moved to a suburb of Chicago, where my traditional meat-and-potatoes family values continued to take root. Each day, I traveled by bus through cornfields to school and came home to my cookie-cutter house on a cul-de-sac. I lived a largely normal Midwestern childhood, participating in extracurricular activities like basketball and marching band. My mother played the traditional role of stay-at-home mom who volunteered as Room Mom, sewed matching outfits for my siblings and me each holiday, and had dinner on the table by five oclock every night. My dad carried his weight by doing the stereotypically male chores like mowing the lawn and taking out the trash, and he was always good for a game of PIG or HORSE in our driveway.

While I had never thought of my parents as having the most agreeable or even the happiest of marriages, divorce wasnt in my frame of reference. You can imagine my complete and utter shock when they divorced my senior year of high school, after twenty-five years of marriage. My dad and I had been touring a college a few hours away when my mom filled her car with a few essentials and left. She had rented an apartment across town and invited me to stay with herI was the only child still living at home at the time. Even though I missed her, I chose to finish out my senior year with my dad. When the summer began, I joined my mom in her tiny apartment and began to come to grips with the fact that everything I thought I knew about marriage and family had been turned upside down.

To be clear, I knew then, like I know now, that marriage is a two-way street, and although my mom was the one who left, there was hurt and pain caused on both sides. Regardless of what happened, the desire for a traditional family ran deep for me, but as I witnessed my mom start over professionally and find her identity independent from my dad at nearly fifty years old, I began to sense the seeds of a new desire being sown in me to have a career and stability in my own right.